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GM Opens Addition To Their Advanced Technology Center In California

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General Motors’ Advanced Technology Center in Torrance, Calif. will be receiving a 12,000 square-foot addition to its facility. The Advanced Tech Center serves as a proving ground for engineering and testing of future clean energy and high efficiency vehicles. Essentially, the company is moving its Advanced Vehicle Technology Center previously located in Burbank, Calif. to Torrance.

The employees will use the extra space to play with up-and-coming green tech for new vehicles. GM has big plans for the center which is foretold by the inclusion of electric charging stations, hydrogen fuel stations, and battery maintenance and development facilities. The facility will be the field testing home of the Chevrolet Volt and GM’s EN-V.

“California and Torrance are playing a key role in the transformation of the automotive industry,” said David Tulauskas, GM’s regional director of state government relations, during the opening ceremony.

LOS ANGELES — After a brief reprieve, gas prices continue their inexorable summer climb, but Nathaniel Connor hardly notices.
Connor, who lives just beyond the eastern border of Santa Monica in Los Angeles, hasn’t visited the pump in the last three months thanks to his two electric vehicles and a plethora of solar panels affixed to the roof of his house that fuel them.
Connor was what one might call an “early adopter” of solar energy, and he’s become an even bigger cheerleader for electric vehicles, which he views as part of the answer to the growing question about our country’s dependence on fossil fuels.
He hopes that his system can show people that electric vehicles and clean energy have come a long way.
“People don’t have to sacrifice,” Connor said.
The 30-year veteran of the electric industry bought his first solar panel, a 30-watt unit made by the gas company Arco, in the 1980s for $400.
He still has it, a slim brown fixture that has since taken a backseat to the larger, cheaper and more modern models he bought from a German company that produce seven times as much power.
The panels produce roughly 15 kilowatts of electricity per day, more than enough to meet his energy needs, power his two electric vehicles and even sell some back to Southern California Edison for a paltry 40 cents per hour.
At that rate, Connor is happy to just feed his cars, which he figures saves him $7.40 for every 50 miles traveled compared to a gas-powered car that gets 25 miles to the gallon.
Connor tackles vehicle travel with a one-two punch. For longer trips, he has a Chevy Volt, which he leases from the company for about $300 per month, which was about what he was paying in gas in his old car.
Shorter trips get zapped with his Zap, a small, red contraption with an open bed that Connor describes as a “Tonka truck.”
“For where I go, this is perfect,” Connor said.
While the Volt requires a specific charging station attached to the side of the home, Connor has created his own mechanism for charging the truck that he calls Con Air.
It lets him save about 15 percent more energy than he would using a traditional plug because it channels energy from his solar panels into the truck directly without changing the type of current.
The Connors of the world are multiplying, especially in California.